Spike! (1999)

Spike! was a comic I did for a monthly manga contest back in 1999 before I moved to Japan, however, I couldn’t get it finished in time and it was left undone. Here are the first ten pages, you can click on Show below to reveal and click on any image to read it as a slideshow. It is NSFW due to nudity and the sexual situation:

These 10 pages were done during the months of March to April 1999. Having done A Heart Made of Glass, I was interested in trying to do the perspective of another human being other than myself, a teenage girl.

The broader story behind it, was a woman who gives herself to the man she loves, then realizes that he doesn’t view the losing of her virginity with quite the same importance as she did. She overhears a conversation between her boyfriend and her friends about the event, and, if you know guy talk, it wasn’t anything she needed to hear.

She has a heated argument with her boyfriend, which ends badly. She runs off and makes the declaration “I hope no one ever gets close to me again.”

As it is, her declaration comes true. Eminating from her body “psychic spikes” come forth whenever she gets close to anyone. These spikes, which at first, aren’t visible, make people who get close to her nauseous. Hence the name “Spike”. Anyways, it was to be an exploration of loneliness when one cannot get close to people, the “powerful imprisonment of losing the ability to feel the warm contact of those you care about.” I still kind of like the premise, but lack the motivation to do it, like every other project I think. It continued the theme of depression which was at the core of A Heart Made of Glass but sadly I didn’t get to it.

Although Sexy Losers took my focus away from Spike! permanently, this comic was important to me as a transition from A Heart Made of Glass to Sexy Losers.